Panasonic Palmcorder PV-GS500 Mini DV Camcorder

UPDATE August 08
Still using the camcorder several times a week. I have shot a lot of video for walkme2.com. The white balance problem happens most often with flourescent lighting. The dirty head message becomes worse with higher humidity. We are in Hong Kong where the outdoor humidity is 80-95%. I must have shot a couple hundred hours of video by now, and still love the camera. No more blue stripe problem since the last update.


UPDATE March 08 (22 months old):
Recently the auto white balance is having trouble, the video is often blue for the first 10-20 seconds and the auto gain/iris control is starting to jump in noticable steps.
Also, I have had a lot of "dirty head" messages, and sometimes blue stripes across the screen during playback as if it did not record the video. I have run the head cleaning tape many times and it is not correcting the problem.

UPDATE Jan 08:
I purchased this camcorder from beachcamera.com in May 06. I have used it for over 1.5 years and over 100 hours of video tape. I also purchased their BP-DU21 Battery and their wide angle and telephoto lens set.
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When using the wide angle lens, the camcorder has to be zoomed in slightly to get rid of the missing corners which you dont see till you get it in the computer. This is probably because it requires a step ring that spaces the wide angle lens farther from the camera. Still the angle of view is about 40% greater than without it and I found the wide angle lens to be of great value when indoors, or in tight places like hallways. The telephoto lens requires a camcorder zoom of at least 3x to eliminate the missing corners. The telephoto lens was great for photographing animals in Botswana. The wide angle lens comes apart and one section acts as a macro lens. You can focus on 1/4 inch object with fair clarity, but not much depth of field. I had photos posted on Yahoo till they closed their site, and flickr only allows 200 photos, so I have removed the photos I had posted there.
Before I managed to get the lens hood off the camera,
I measured the angle of view from the normal camcorder as 40 degrees, the maximum angle of view with the wide angle lens of 82 degrees, with about 66 degrees useable when you zoom in to 2X to get rid of the missing corners. I finally ground grip points in the hood so I could unscrew it. It is too smooth to be able to turn it with out any grip. With the lens hood off, I think the angle of view is more like 75 degrees. With the telephoto lens I get a max angle of 20 degrees with a useable maximum angle of 8 degrees when zoomed to 3X and the lens hood still on.
I have not remeasured the angles since I got the hood off but screwing the lenses directly to the cam instead of its lens hood makes a bid difference. I cut groves in the shiny smooth face of the hood with a dremel so I can grip it to remove it.

Panasonic says the BP-DU21 battery will last nearly 4 hours. I was getting about 55 minutes out of it during normal on off use. I get about 35 minutes out of the supplied battery (CGA-DU14). Since then I returned home, did a google search on the power adapter that goes from the battery charger to the camcorder (part number K2GJ2DZ00018), bought it, attached a 5 cell AA battery pack to it, and I can now power the camcorder with easy to obtain AA cells. I used this device in Vanuatu and Botswana and find Alkaline batteries to last about 20 minutes, and Photo Lithium batteries lasted 1 hour 40 min! Definately worth having as a backup if you dont have any AC power.
Another modification is, I carefully glued (contact cement)some foam over the microphone holes to reduce wind noise. This camera suffers from wind noise so much that I was replacing most of my sound with music. The foam eliminated almost ALL wind noise except for very strong wind.

I find the grip belt to be too low on the body of the camcorder and it makes the cam feel like I am holding a flopping fish. I compensate by attaching a mono-pod to the cam which allows me to hold the cam much more steady. It also works well holding the cam well over head to see over other people. I have posted videos on Youtube.com. Search for NikTheCat and you will find my videos. A couple of the oldest videos are with the old sony camcorder.
I found the zoom to be a little hard to control at first, but with practice, you get used to it. It will zoom at various speeds.

I find that I can not manually set the gain as high as I want. The 18 dB gain is probably sufficient for most users, however, I would much prefer a gain of probably 30 dB. I am trying to reproduce my Symphony of Lights video (on Gofish.com) that I took with the old Sony cam, but I find this cam produces a much darker image than that old Sony. It is hard to make out the lasers with the Panasonic unless I brighten the image with software.

I love having three separate controls for Focus, Zoom, and Iris/gain. I just wish I could manually change the gain continuously instead of in discrete steps. The cam does a fine job adjusting in auto mode. I like the manual controls. It is the main reason I purchased this cam.

The cam is quiet. There is no motor noise humming like the old Sony. (update: Feb 08, filming in fog, I had increasing hum on the video. The source is undetermined)

There are two menu systems. Stuff you dont use under MENU, and stuff you do use under the joystick control. I would prefer that the items were in a list (10 items) along the right of the screen instead of having 2 or 3 in five little circles that you have to flip through. Fortunately, in manual mode, it starts with the 5th circle, which contains the iris, white balance and shutter speed.

I like the options of USB, Firewire, or the old red-white-yellow RCA plugs for getting data out of the camcorder. Be sure when you load video into the computer that you put it onto a second hard drive, not the physical drive your operating system is on. If you dont you will often lose frames and make your video glitchy.

All in all, I am very happy with this camcorder and feel it is a good purchase for the price vs. the controls provided. The video quality provided at 40X is comparable to my 8 year old Sony un-zoomed, the color is fantastic, and it weighs a lot less. Probably should not exceed 30x when zooming. I have had many people watch my video work and ask what camera I am using. They like the quality of the video.

I also recommend getting the wide angle lens and telephoto lenses.
This was written around Aug 2006
This was updated 11 Jan 2008, 4 March 08
Rob